JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
Whittier (1807-1892) stands in decided contrast both in upbringing and
in career with the other great New England contemporaries. All the
rest were college men, graduates of either Bowdoin or Harvard between
1821 and 1838, and all were familiar from youth with the world of
books. Whittier was a farm boy, sprung from untutored farming stock,
and in the way of formal schooling had only two terms at Haverhill
Academy, paid for with his own hard earnings. He was no less retiring
in disposition than the Concord group, yet he was early drawn into
the antislavery conflict, and through all his middle years (from 1833
to 1865) he was an untiring man of affairs. Emerson's interest in
politics ended with the symbolical value of the Concord town meeting;
Thoreau's was registered in his spectacular protest (see p. 224) at a
pernicious national policy; Hawthorne's was limited to the performance
of duties in posts at the disposal of his political friends; but
Whittier undertook the achievement of national ideals through the
adoption of wise political measures. The same American to whom Emerson
spoke as a thinker Whittier addressed as a voter. In consequence of
this his immediate social value became greater, though the verse
written in behalf of reform was inferior.[16] In spite of his active
rôle in public life, however, Whittier was very much less a man of the
world than Lowell, Holmes, or Longfellow. These latter were all men of
family, with advantages of college training and foreign travel. They
were conscious members of the intellectual aristocracy, bred in polite
usages and steeped in polite literature. When Whittier came to Boston
for his first brief editorial experience it was not to the Boston of
the charmed circle to which they and their like belonged. It was not
until he had won independent fame that he became their honored friend.
By birth he represented an old and stalwart element in New England
life--the comparatively unlettered pioneers who made up the silent
majority of the population.
[16] See his own acknowledgment in the "Proem" to the poems of 1842.
He was in every sense an Essex County man. He was born in 1807 in the
township of Haverhill, to which his ancestors had come in 1638, on the
farm they had owned since 1647, in the house they had built in 1688. He
lived in the little three-mile strip between the Merrimac and the New
Hampshire line for all his eighty-five years, first at his birthplace,
and for the last fifty-six years at Amesbury, a few miles nearer the
Atlantic. He thus became in a way an embodiment of local tradition. He
felt the strong attachment to his small part of the world that develops
in a group whose memories and interests are almost wholly local, and he
felt an allegiance to the soil that could respond to Emerson's "Earth
Song":
They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?
As a consequence he described the homely beauties that surrounded him,
recorded the traditions of the region, and quite unconsciously, as his
rimes often prove, wrote in its dialect (see p. 263). His sense of the
reality of his state's division into counties is best indicated in the
stirring roster which he calls in "Massachusetts to Virginia" (ll.
67-80).
Two other fundamental conditions prevailed in Essex County, though no
more strongly than throughout the entire state. It was a time and place
of splendid opportunities. In the colonial centuries, hardly more than
completed when Whittier was born, pioneer America had barely coped
with the elementary problems of settlement. There still remained almost
everything that had to do with the alleviations of life--with the nicer
refinements, material, intellectual, and æsthetic. For any young man
who could combine the will to do with some degree of action, the chance
for achievement was exhilarating,--as the Essex boys Garrison and
Whittier were to prove. The religious impulse of the day was closely
related to these other stimulating conditions. It had the momentum of
the generations behind it and the stir of the nineteenth century in it.
It was old like the country and new like the period. It was dedicated
to a high purpose, but its purpose was more than the personal salvation
of the communicant; it was the salvation of Church and State, the
bringing of God's kingdom "on earth as it is in heaven."
Whittier grew up, then, in simple and unlettered surroundings,
comparable to those of Carlyle, much more propitious than those of
Lincoln. Like many another boy of the time when "child hygiene"
was undreamed of, he probably suffered from insufficient clothing,
unsuitable food, and undue exertion on the farm. At any rate his vigor
was impaired and he matured, as often has happened, with just the
fragility of health that responded to enforced care and resulted in
long life. The reading supplied at home was arid,--a few narratives of
frontier adventure, a few religious books, "the Bible towering o'er the
rest," and a number of biographies.
The Lives of Franklin and of Penn,
Of Fox and Scott, all worthy men.
The Lives of Pope, of Young, and Prior,
Of Milton, Addison and Dyer;
Of Doddridge, Fénelon and Gray,
Armstrong, Akenside and Gay.
The Life of Burroughs, too, I've read,
As big a rogue as e'er was made;
And Tufts, who, I will be civil,
Was worse than an incarnate devil.
Poetry came to Whittier through the chance visit of a Yankee gypsy,
"'a pawky auld carle' of a wandering Scotchman. To him I owe my first
introduction to the songs of Burns. After eating his bread and cheese
and drinking his mug of cider he gave us Bonny Doon, Highland Mary,
and Auld Lang Syne." When the boy was fourteen his first schoolmaster,
Joshua Coffin, brought a volume of Burns one day to the house and
was persuaded to leave it for a while as a loan. With that closer
introduction to the world of poetry Whittier's own verse-writing began.
At eighteen he composed the first bit that was destined to appear in
print. It was an imitation of Moore, "The Exile's Departure," which was
sent without his knowledge to William Lloyd Garrison's _Free Press_
at Newburyport and published in June, 1826. The young editor, himself
only twenty-one, was greatly impressed by the promise of these lines
and hunted up the author, coming to the farm just when the embarrassed
youth was hunting out a stolen hen's nest under the barn. Garrison's
interest was of the greatest importance. Whittier was encouraged
to write the nearly one hundred pieces of verse which appeared in
the _Haverhill Gazette_ in 1827 and 1828, and to earn by shoemaking
the money necessary for his first summer term in the new Haverhill
Academy in 1827. The little learning he thus secured he converted by
school-teaching into enough to take him for another term the next year,
and then in 1828, through the continuing influence of Garrison, he was
given his first position as an editor, on the _American Manufacturer_
in Boston. He was still a simple country boy, and his published
address, "to the young mechanics of New England," suggests that he had
not been encouraged to forget this fact during his first four months in
town.
He has felt, in common with you all, the injustice of that illiberal
feeling, which has been manifested toward mechanics by the wealthy
and arrogant of other classes. He has felt his cheeks burn, and his
pulse quicken, when witnessing the open, undisguised contempt with
which his friends have been received--not from any defect in their
moral character, their minds, or their persons, but simply because
they depended upon their own exertions for their means of existence,
and upon their own industry and talents for a passport to public
favor.
He held his post here only from January to August, 1829, when he was
summoned home by his father's illness. Editorship of the _Haverhill
Gazette_ followed for the first half of 1830, when he was called to
the _New England Review_ in Hartford, Connecticut. This position he
occupied with one interruption until the end of 1831, at which time he
took his leave of journalism.
He was twenty-four years old--in the restless period between youth and
real manhood. He had known little but hardship and had come out of
it with impaired health. There was little to cheer him in the tragic
career of Burns, in the almost desperate enthusiasm of Garrison, or in
the cynicism of Byron, to which he had lately become subject. To cap
all, he had been "crossed in love." He could not even have the grim
comfort of realizing that he was passing through a youthful phase when
he wrote to a friend:
Disappointment in a thousand ways has gone over my heart, and left it
dust. Yet I still look forward with high anticipations. I have placed
the goal of my ambitions high--but with the blessing of God it shall
be reached. The world has at last breathed into my bosom a portion
of its own bitterness, and I now feel as if I would wrestle manfully
in the strife of men. If my life is spared, the world shall know me
in a loftier capacity than _as a writer of rhymes_. There--is not
that boasting?--But I have said it with a strong pulse and a swelling
heart, and I shall strive to realize it.
This temporary abandonment of poetry was after all only an evidence
of his regard for it. With all the other young writers of his day, he
was hoping for new achievement in American literature and wondering in
the back of his mind if he were not to be a contributor to it. At the
moment Bryant had turned to journalism the New England group were not
yet articulate, and the call of politics was loud. "There was nowhere
in America a writer of verse with more immediate promise than Whittier,
[yet] he was a sick man in the old house at the back of Job's Hill,
disgusted with poetry and planning how he could best get to Congress."
Once more Garrison's influence was to determine him. The general
inclination toward humanitarian reform had stirred him to the
establishment of the _Liberator_, and when he declared, "I am in
earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat
a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD," he found a natural ally
in Whittier. The great step came in 1833 with the poet's publication
at his own expense of the pamphlet "Justice and Expediency," with
its wider circulation through reprints by sympathizers, with the
controversial sequels, and with his share in the founding of the
American Anti-Slavery Society. In the years to come he said, "I set a
higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration
of 1833, than on the title-page of any book." It was the deepest test
of courage. In the first place it meant that a sensitive young poet
who had already felt the injustice of the conservative classes must
lay himself open to their contempt and ridicule. It was a bitter time
to do this, for never was a day when the miscellaneous inclination
to reform offered so great an array of amusing causes and champions.
Emerson's derisive list, "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers,
Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day-Baptists,
Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers," is
evidence of the degree to which the general idea of reform had been
discredited even in the most liberal minds. For there is no doubt that
many of the projects were foolish or that the hopes reposed in them as
social cure-alls were ridiculous. But the adoption of the abolition
cause involved far more than ridicule--nothing less than the completest
disapproval of most good citizens. Considered in the large, lawyers
and clergymen are conservatives by profession, deeply committed to
the past; and here was slavery sanctioned in the law and the gospel.
The prosperous merchant and banker are never markedly eager for a
change from the conditions which have fostered their prosperity; and
here was a whole economic system, from the plantations of the South
to the financial houses of Wall Street and State Street, erected on
a foundation of slave labor. According to Emerson cotton thread held
the Union together. Men might devote their lives to the substitution
of hooks and eyes for buttons or the adoption of a vegetarian diet,
and get their pay in laughter, but when they threatened to disturb
the industrial system they were pelted and hated and cursed. All this
Whittier foresaw when he followed his own counsel of later years,
"My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular
but noble cause." The history of his participation in the abolition
movement does not belong to such a chapter as this except for a record
of how he used his literary powers for the good of the cause, and for a
comment on the kind of poetry that inevitably resulted from such use.
Between 1831 and 1833 Whittier had become intelligently interested
in politics; indeed, had he been a few months older in the autumn of
1832 it is possible that he might have been elected to Congress as a
compromise candidate when Caleb Cushing was unable to secure the seat
for himself, though strong enough to prevent the choice of an opponent.
The young poet had thus learned a good deal about the value of public
opinion and about the power of publicity in molding and wielding it.
When the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed he had at his hand
a great megaphone that could project his voice to the far districts
of the country. As a writer of propagandist verse he was endowed with
what in an orator would be a "natural speaking voice." His convictions
were deep and sincere, he had an easy command of simple rhythms, and
he was used to thinking and speaking in the language of the people. He
was in no danger of falling into academic subtlety or erudition. So,
like his greatest American predecessor in this field--Freneau (see pp.
72-77)--he spoke again and again and always with telling effect.
As a good journalist and rhetorician he made his issues plain
and simple--much simpler in fact than they really were, avoiding
embarrassing qualifications. He appealed to the Northerners as a
people unanimously opposed to human bondage and not as a half-hearted
and divided group. In a generation when the sense of statehood was
infinitely stronger than it is now he assumed a high level of altruism
in Massachusetts, while he stimulated a sense of state resentment
against Virginia or South Carolina. With the memories of the Revolution
refreshed by a series of recent semicentennials, he employed the
conventional language of protest against tyranny; the antislavery
verses resound with vituperative allusions to chains, fetters, yokes,
rods, manacles, and gyves, with Scriptural idiom and with scorn for
the repudiation of Revolutionary principles of freedom. In the opening
lines of "The Crisis" he was skillfully suggestive by his paraphrase
of the missionary hymn "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," and in the
"Letter from a Missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South,
in Kansas to a Distinguished Politician" he turned to contempt the
perversion of the Scriptures in defense of slavery.
"Go it, old hoss!" they cried, and cursed the niggers--
Fulfilling thus the word of prophecy,
"Cursed be Canaan."
All this was justifiable, though it frequently was anything but high
art. At times, however, the heat of passion led Whittier to write
lines for which there was little or no excuse. His disappointment at
Webster's famous "Seventh of March" compromise speech in 1850 led him
to the extreme of reproach which was felt by most of the North--an
extreme from which he shared the common reaction of later years and for
which he made the manly atonement of "The Lost Occasion," moved by
"the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness."
The lowest level of his war verse is reached in the most familiar
"Barbara Frietchie." This has all the attributes that are usually to
be found in popular favorites. It is conventional in form, easily
intelligible, a narrative of picturesque tableaux, and capped with an
applied moral. The only charge that can be fairly brought against it
is, however, a fundamental one--that it is essentially false to the
facts. The middle third of the poem that has to do explicitly with
Stonewall Jackson is partly libelous and partly ridiculous. Jackson
was an honest and devoted man, but he is represented as coming through
the town like a stock-melodrama villain, blushing with remorse at the
challenge of Barbara and capping the climax with a burst of cheap and
unsoldierly rhetoric. No doubt it expressed at the moment what the
passions of war could lead even a gentle Quaker to believe; no doubt
also it was good war journalism; but granting these concessions, it
stands as a deplorable evidence of the depths to which noble talents
can be degraded in the times that try men's souls.
"The Waiting," a poem of 1862, is in the loftier vein of one who does
not reënforce himself through disparagement of his enemies. It is
a lament of unfulfilled endeavor in behalf of an ideal cause. As a
really great lyric should be, it is both personal and general in its
application. It expresses the despondency of the enfeebled and aging
poet that he could not join "the shining ones with plumes of snow" in
the good fight; and in its reference to "the harder task of standing
still" it alludes not only to his resignation at the moment but also to
the patient policy which in former years had estranged the extremest
abolitionists from him. It also must have been an immediate source of
consolation to thousands who have been confronted by urgent duties
they could not perform; while at the same time in a broader way it has
expressed the faith of "Ulysses" and "Abt Vogler," of "In Memoriam"
and "Saul" and "Asolando," that "good but wished with God is done."
Like Freneau (see pp. 71-81), but to a more marked degree, Whittier
was most popular at first for his journalistic, controversial poems,
though his most permanent work has nothing to do with either noble or
ignoble strife. He followed the example of Burns, who inspired his
first literary passion, in writing simple lyrics and narratives of his
own countryside. These included many of the legends of Boston, like
"Cassandra Southwick," of Hartford; like "Abraham Davenport," or of
his beloved district north of Boston; like "The Wreck of Rivermouth,"
"The Garrison of Cape Ann," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride." As a rule he
was not inclined to tell stories without some clear moral implication,
and all too often he expounded this implication, sermon-wise, at the
end. Thus he tells with dignity and fine effect the story of the Indian
specters of Cape Ann, who were finally driven away by the prayers
of the devout garrison after repeated volleys from their musketry
had failed. In eighty lines the tale is told; an added stanza calls
attention to the fact that there is a moral in the ancient fiction;
and two more in a sort of sub-postscript indulge in a final burst of
poetical exegesis. "Skipper Ireson," the best of Whittier's ballads, is
no less moralistic, but is done with more art, for the ethical point is
developed within the account instead of being tacked on after it.
In poems such as "Hampton Beach," "The Lakeside," "The Last Walk in
Autumn," and "At Eventide" Whittier pictures the nature surroundings
of his long lifetime; and in a generous succession, from "Memories" of
1841 to "In School-Days," of nearly thirty years later, he takes his
readers along the borderlands of autobiography. Preëminent among his
recollections of persons and places is "Snow-Bound." The snowstorm,
which Emerson celebrated as a thing in itself, Whittier adopted as the
background for a winter idyl. The "Flemish pictures of old days" which
he drew of his Haverhill homestead were annotated in great detail by
the poet, but their virtue lies not so much in the fact that they are
true to a given set of conditions, as that they are essentially true
to the rural life of Whittier's New England--just as the pictures in
"The Cotter's Saturday Night" are true to the Scotland of Burns, and
the pictures of "The Deserted Village" to the landlord-ridden Ireland
of Goldsmith. And to the attentive reader the contrasts between the
peasant life of Great Britain and the nearest thing to it that can be
found in America are abiding witnesses to the practical virtues of a
democracy. In this simple idyl, written with "intimate knowledge and
delight," Whittier combined truth and beauty as in no other of his
poems.
For summarized criticism of Whittier's poetry there are few better
passages than his own "Proem" to the collected poems of 1849 and
the comment in Lowell's "Fable for Critics," of the preceding year.
Whittier acknowledges the lack in his lines of "mystic beauty, dreamy
grace" or of psychological analysis converted into poetry; Lowell
confirms the judgment with
Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction
And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,
While, borne with the rush of his metre along,
The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,
Content with the whirl and delirium of song.
Whittier lays his best gifts on the shrine of freedom with an avowal of
his love for mankind and his hearty and vehement hatred of all forms of
oppression, and Lowell properly qualifies the value of these gifts with
the statement that the Quaker's fervor has sometimes dulled him to the
distinction between "simple excitement and pure inspiration." Whittier
deprecates the harshness and rigor of the rhythms which beat "Labor's
hurried time, or Duty's rugged march," but Lowell says that at his best
the reformer-poet has written unsurpassable lyrics. And both pronounce
strictures on his rimes which have been conventionally repeated by most
of the later critics who have commented on them at all.
Many of Whittier's apparently false rimes, however,--as the author of
the "Biglow Papers" should have recognized--are perfect if uttered
according to the prevailing pronunciation of his district. Lowell
passes for a scrupulous dialect expert when he writes, "This heth my
faithful shepherd ben," but Whittier is derided for allowing the same
final verb to rime with "Of all sad words of tongue or pen," whereas
the sole difference is that one recognized the pronunciation in his
spelling and the other took it for granted. If Whittier had employed
Lowell's method, in transcribing "Barbara Frietchie," for example, he
would have written,
Quick, as it fell, from the broken sta'af
Dame Barbara snatched the silken sca'af,
and he would have concluded with
Peace and odda and beauty drawr
Reound thy symbol of light and lawr;
And evva the stahs above look deown
On thy stahs below in Frederick teown!
For the _ou_ sounds belong to Essex County, and all the others to
Boston and even to hallowed Cambridge. False rimes Whittier wrote in
abundance, but by no means all of the apparently bad ones should be
condemned at first glance.
Until the publication of "Snow-Bound" in 1866 Whittier's verse, though
widely circulated, had brought him in but little money return. For
twenty years, he later recalled, he had been given the cold shoulder
by editors and publishers; but as the hottest prejudices began to wane
they could no longer afford to neglect his manuscripts, for these
had in them the leading characteristics of "fireside favorites," the
only sort of poetry that is always certain of the sales to which no
publisher is indifferent. In the first place, their form is simple;
common words and short sentences are cast in conventional rhythms with
frequent rime. They are therefore easy to commit to memory. In content
they are easy to understand, not given to subtleties of analysis or
to philosophical abstractions. More often than not they are either
narratives like the war ballads and the New England chronicles or
strung on a narrative thread like "Snow-Bound." Almost always they
contain vivid pictures; mention of "Skipper Ireson" or "Telling the
Bees" or "The Huskers" or "Maud Muller" recalls tableaux first and then
the ideas connected with them. And finally they contain the applied
moral which the immature or the unliterary mind dearly loves, the
very feature which proves irksome to the bookish reader serving as an
added attraction to the unsophisticated one. It is not difficult to
adduce popular favorites which do not include all of these traits,
but beyond doubt the great majority of poems that are beloved by the
multitude contain most if not all of them. When, in addition to these
features, poems are essentially and permanently true to life and to the
best there is in life their vogue is likely to be lasting as well as
widespread. People cherish them as they do the melodies to which some
of them are fortunately set, or as they do certain bits from Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schubert, which belong to the repertory of
every pianola or talking machine. On the other hand, the intricate
beauties of Browning and Wagner or the austerities of Milton and Brahms
will always be "caviar to the general."
The last third of Whittier's life brought him the rewards he had
earned and the serenity he deserved. He lived quietly at Amesbury
under his own roof or with his cousins at near-by Danvers. He was on
friendly terms with the eminent literary men and women of his day.
A long protraction of ill-health from boyhood on had developed him
into a fragile, gentle old man, a little shy and reticent and to all
appearances quite without the fighting powers which he had displayed
when there was need for them. If one chooses to recall Whittier from a
single portrait, it should be from one taken in his middle rather than
in his later life, for the earlier ones are far more rugged.
As the years passed they were marked by a succession of public
tributes. At seventy the most famous of the annual "_Atlantic Monthly_
Dinners" was arranged in his honor. At eighty his home state officially
celebrated his birthday. The anniversaries that followed were
recognized in the public schools of many states; and so with "honor,
love, obedience, troops of friends" he came to the end in 1892.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. Works. Riverside Edition. 7 vols. (I-IV,
Poetical works; V-VII, Prose.) Standard Library Edition. 9 vols.
(Includes content of the Riverside Edition plus the life by S.
T. Pickard.) 1892. The best one-volume edition of the poems is
the Cambridge Student's Edition. 1914. His works appeared in book
form originally as follows: Legends of New England, 1831; Moll
Pitcher, 1832; Justice and Expediency, 1833; Mogg Megone, 1836;
Poems written between 1830 and 1838, 1837; Ballads, Anti-Slavery
Poems, etc., 1838; Lays of my Home, 1843; The Stranger in Lowell,
1845; Supernaturalism in New England, 1847; Voices of Freedom,
1849; Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, 1850; Songs of Labor,
1850; The Chapel of the Hermits, 1853; Literary Recreations and
Miscellanies, 1854; The Panorama, 1856; Home Ballads, 1860; In
War Time, 1863; National Lyrics, 1865; Snow-Bound, 1866; The
Tent on the Beach, 1867; Among the Hills, 1868; Miriam, 1870;
The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 1872; Hazel Blossoms, 1874; Centennial
Hymn, 1876; The Vision of Echard, 1878; The King's Missive, 1881;
The Bay of Seven Islands, 1883; Saint Gregory's Guest, 1886; At
Sundown, 1892.
=Bibliography=
Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 436-451.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Samuel T. Pickard. 1894. 2 vols.
BURTON, RICHARD. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1901.
CARPENTER, G. R. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1903. (_A. M. L. Ser._)
CLAFLIN, MRS. MARY B. Personal Recollections of John Greenleaf
Whittier. 1893.
FIELDS, MRS. ANNIE. Authors and Friends. 1896.
FLOWER, B. O. Whittier, Prophet, Seer and Man. 1896.
HAWKINS, C. J. The Mind of Whittier. 1904.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Cheerful Yesterdays.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Contemporaries.
HIGGINSON, T. W. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1902. (_E. M. L. Ser._)
KENNEDY, W. S. John Greenleaf Whittier, his Life, Genius and
Writings. 1882.
LAWTON, W. C. Studies in the New England Poets. 1898.
LINTON, W. J. Life of John Greenleaf Whittier. 1903.
PAYNE, W. M. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II,
Bk. II, chap. xiii.
PICKARD, S. T. Whittier Land. 1904.
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature, Vol. II, chap. vi.
STEDMAN, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.
TAYLOR, BAYARD. Critical Essays and Literary Notes. 1880.
UNDERWOOD, F. H. John Greenleaf Whittier: a Biography. 1884.
WENDELL, BARRETT. Stelligeri and Other Essays. 1893.
WHITMAN, WALT. Specimen Days. April 16, 1881.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the poems in Whittier the titles of which suggest local treatment
of Essex County life and scenes. Compare these with similar poems in
Burns.
Read such poems as "First-Day Thoughts," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "The
Garrison of Cape Ann," "The Waiting," "The Eternal Goodness," and "Our
Master" for evidences of Whittier's religion.
Read Emerson's essay on "The New England Reformers," remembering that
Whittier was one of these.
Compare the war poetry of Whittier and Freneau.
In Whittier's controversial poetry note the different levels of
"Barbara Frietchie," "Expostulation," and "The Waiting," and cite other
poems which may fairly be located in these three classes.
Read Whittier's ballads with the comments on page 261 concerning his
inclination to expound. Compare and contrast Whittier's "Snow-Bound"
with Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night."
Apply the tests for popular fireside poetry to those poems of
Whittier's which you regard as general favorites.